{"id":3085,"date":"2009-10-19T20:10:12","date_gmt":"2009-10-20T06:10:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.studionewmedia.com\/blog\/?p=3085"},"modified":"2009-10-19T20:10:12","modified_gmt":"2009-10-20T06:10:12","slug":"quick-and-dirty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/studionewmedia.com\/blog\/index.php\/2009\/10\/19\/quick-and-dirty\/","title":{"rendered":"Quick and Dirty"},"content":{"rendered":"

Chris had some free time on Saturday afternoon, so we put a ride together at the Ditch. Ckucke and JT were unavailable, but Root, Jeff, and Sara made the trip out to Waimanalo. There hadn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t been much rain since mid-week, but the ground was saturated enough that even the intervening clear days didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t dry up the ground completely. Chris had gone on some crazy all-night hike on Friday evening through Saturday daybreak, so he was taking it easy. Along the climb up to the Ditch junction, a tighty single-speed guy<\/em> with his full-head DH helmet friend<\/em> and brand-new-shiny-Trek friend<\/em> came up the trail. After regaling us with tales of the distant past when he and his friend built all the trails in Waimanalo, he and his buds went down the Ditch, while we continued up Government road to do the side loop<\/em>.<\/p>\n

At the mango tree, we found that the backwardification<\/em> of the trail had been extended to the entrance. The drop in had been covered with rocks and sticks, and a new extension to the contour line had been added to the road. This was definitely the work of people who were riding the trail backwards (probably without the benefit of changeable gears), just like the excessively tight switchbacks that ruined the steep roll-in section. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s fine to add sections to the trail to make it usable in both directions, but to remove the technical sections and force people to only ride one way is dictatorial. In both of these situations, the two options could easily coexist, but the builder chose to obliterate one in favor of the other. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s our way or no way! Trail Nazis!<\/p>\n

A little way into the contour, there was a new line cleared through the undergrowth down a finger ridge. Jeff and Sara went down the normal way to the lower contour, and Chris, Root, and I took the mystery trail. It quickly became apparent that this was cut by the trail-running poachers, evidenced by numerous shin and chest-level punjis and center-of-trail hub-high stumps. If trails weren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t dangerous enough as is, they purposely created obstacles to skewer and trip the user. Good job! Chris went ape-sh!t at one point and bigfooted out one of the stumps. The horribly routed, off-camber cut turned through an unridable back turn, then descended through muddy stairstep cuts to the lower traverse. With that dumb experience leaving a bad taste in out mouths, we rode back to the road and climbed back to the Ditch junction.<\/p>\n

The Ditch was nice and grippy \u00e2\u20ac\u201c mostly dry with a hint of slipperiness in the dark corners. We rode as far as the rest stop, then turned up the inner loop<\/em> to avoid the potential mud and overgrown cane grass further on. Along the drop in to the rock garden<\/em>, there was some evil spiny amaranth growing on the sides of the trail that scratched the skin and left a lasting irritating burn. The rock garden was clear of deadfall and it looked like the bridge had been maintained. Along the climb out, there was a lot of large deadfall blocking the way, and the evil off-cambers were as slippery as ever.<\/p>\n

Along the Ditch returning to the base, I smelled some horses before I saw them. We hadn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t seen any equestrian activity until then. They stopped at a turn to let us pass. There were ladies on two regular horses, and a girl on a BMX horse. Back at the cars, we chewed the fat a while. We had not seen the other riders on the trail at all. After the horses passed through, I saw tighty guy come down to the gate, but he stopped, looked around, then backtracked up the road. His friends weren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t with him. As we were leaving, he came back down – again alone – and rode out down the street. Weird. Whatever. We didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have a particularly long or exertive ride, but it was fun and it shook the cobwebs off the trail riding skillset that we have all been neglecting recently.<\/p>\n

Pictures somewhere<\/a>, maybe\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6<\/p>\n

D = 6.57 km (4.08-miles), Vavr = 9.8 km\/h (6.1-mph), Vmax = 29.1 km\/h (18.1-mph), T = 40-minutes (actual trail time around 1.5 hours)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Chris had some free time on Saturday afternoon, so we put a ride together at the Ditch. Ckucke and JT were unavailable, but Root, Jeff, and Sara made the trip out to Waimanalo. There hadn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t been much rain since mid-week, but the ground was saturated enough that even the intervening clear days didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t dry up […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[5,12],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paJYlx-NL","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/studionewmedia.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3085"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/studionewmedia.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/studionewmedia.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studionewmedia.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studionewmedia.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3085"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/studionewmedia.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3085\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/studionewmedia.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3085"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studionewmedia.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3085"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studionewmedia.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3085"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}